Gutenberg: 5 Cool Ways to use Reusable Blocks

When WordPress 5 dropped, I wasn’t a huge fan of the new block editor, Gutenberg. But after several updates and tweaks, it’s gotten much better. I now use the block editor by default on all of my sites – though I still have some challenges here and there.

While there are plenty of people still whining about Gutenberg, I’ve decided that I’m going to take the time to point out one of its most useful features: reusable blocks.

For those of you still clinging to the Classic Editor, you may find that reusable blocks could be just the thing that makes you reconsider.

The Reusable Block

As its name suggests, a reusable block is a block you craft and then can insert it anywhere you need without having to rebuild that block again. This really helps to automate pieces of content that you regularly type out.

The nice thing about reusable blocks is not only are they easy to create on the fly, but they only take a couple clicks to insert into a post. In addition, if you ever need to change the content, you only need to change it once and it updates on all the posts you’ve used it. Gone are the days of creating scratch posts so you have something to copy/paste from into your new posts!

Examples Uses of Reusable Blocks

There are tons of ways you can make use of reusable blocks. Here are few that I’ve used on this site and others that I run.

Affiliate Link Notices

If you’re an affiliate marketer and many of your posts contain affiliate links, you’re required by law to disclose it on each and every post that contains an affiliate link. This can be tedious work, so in my sites I have an affiliate disclosure reusable block:

For the record, there are no affiliate links in this particular post, but that’s what my notification looks like. And it takes only 2 clicks to insert it as needed – I put it at the top of any post that contains an affiliate link in order to remain compliant with FTC regulations.

Advertising Code

If you place ads on your site via an ad network such as Google Adsense, manually putting in code blocks on every post can be an awfully large time sink. By putting your ad code into reusable blocks, you can call them whenever you want.

This is a great way to eliminate ad insertion plugins. You can create reusable blocks for all the different ad formats you’ve set up and call them anywhere you need them.

Author Boxes

If your theme doesn’t have an author box included in its design and you want to avoid using an author box plugin, you can build one as a reusable block. You can build a block for each author and add them to the end of each post with a couple clicks.

One of the nice things about building author boxes this way is that you can drop multiple authors on the same post – something rare in most themes that usually requires a plugin to accomplish.

Author blocks can be built using an HTML block if you’re into that sort of thing, or you can also install any one of a myriad of plugins that add a variety of blocks to your website.

Email Sign Up Forms

Email lists are still extremely popular marketing tools especially if you have a product that you frequently sell at a discount.

You can build a reusable block with your email signup form code embedded in it and add it to the end of every post.

Again just like other blocks, it takes just a few clicks to insert it in any post or page once you have the block set up.

Insert a Quote of the Day

Do you run a health & fitness website? Do you like having inspirational quotes for your readers? You can create a quote reusable block and have it inserted into every post.

Each day, you just modify the reusable block with a new quote and it updates everywhere on your site.

Gutenberg Reusable Blocks – Final Thoughts

There are countless uses for reusable blocks. And while the Gutenberg editor can still feel clunky for writers, you can get back some of that time with reusable blocks.

Sharif Jameel is a business owner, IT professional, runner, & musician. His professional certifications include CASP, Sec+, Net+, MCSA, & ITIL and others. He’s also the guitar player for the Baltimore-based cover band, Liquifaction.

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Sharif Jameel

Sharif Jameel is a business owner, IT professional, runner, & musician. His professional certifications include CASP, Sec+, Net+, MCSA, & ITIL and others. He’s also the guitar player for the Baltimore-based cover band, Liquifaction.